


A Spirit Of Fire

by genarti



Category: J R R Tolkien - The Silmarillion
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:p_zeitgeist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 11:38:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/148855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Last of all is set the name of Melkor, He who arises in Might. But that name he has forfeited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Spirit Of Fire

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to Becca and TL and Sandry for betaing, and to p_zeitgeist for an awesome prompt!
> 
> Written originally for p_zeitgeist for [Yuletide 2008](http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/68/aspirit.html).

You are a creature of song: you are a being of light and of flame and of ice, and of the song of all these.

You sing. You are.

And you listen.

Slowly, with your brethren, you come to know others. You learn more of the mind of Eru who created you, and you find it good. You hear the twining of other songs with yours, and you are pleased.

Great things will come of this, you are certain; for you have only begun to learn, and you will grow in understanding. You will help shape this song for the glory of Eru, and create of these works a beauty unsurpassed.

  
\----------------  


You listen to your kin and to the stirrings of your own being; and so you learn much. But slowly, you come to find that your brethren have little left to tell you that you desire to know. For what you seek is the Imperishable Flame and the creation of beauty, and Eru guards it to Himself, and sparing little thought for the emptiness beyond the demesnes of the Ainur. You would fill that emptiness. You would kindle warmth there, and bring new things into Being within it, and make of it all that it could be. Therefore you slip away from your kindred, at first seldom and then often, and you seek alone through the void places.

You find not the Imperishable Flame, nor any trace of it. You find nothing there but void, and the melodies of your yearning.

But you learn, in searching after light, that there is a beauty too in utter darkness.

  
\----------------  


When Eru calls all of His spirits together, you rejoice. You deem that at last He will share of His store of hidden melodies with you, and you are not wrong. This new theme that Eru declares unto the assembled choirs of you is nothing you have imagined before. It unfolds in layers of massive chords and miniscule details; and you stand amazed before the power and splendour of this creation. This is what you have been longing to find, and of which the void held no hint.

Your kin are less eager, and their imaginations less subtle. None of them, from the least spirits to Manwë your brother in power, dream of aught but to slavishly copy the themes Eru has laid before you.

Is this what the Ainur were created for? Is this the reason for the heart of power and majesty with which He gifted you; is this all He meant when He spoke of adorning the theme, that you might only add a trill here or there? No, you say in your heart. He has shown you this music full of Being and Creation, and you will use it to create.

If others around you falter when you take up a new, discordant line, it serves only to spur your voice to greater strength. Of discord comes glory: you can hear in each suspended clash the aching for the resolution that might come, and it drives the whole to a deeper power. They, too, could hear if only they would listen as you do. When a third theme joins the work, you sing on until the whole ceases in a thunderous, whispering chord that shudders the vaulted halls and pierces through you more than any fire or void ever has.

Eru chastises you, but you hear what he says below it: that you have done better than any of your kin, as none of them thought to do; for without you, this Music would be a pale, tame shadow of what it has become. Your kindred hear only his reproof, and listen no further. But you have eyes only for the vision which your gathered Music has brought into tumultuous Being.

You have never desired anything so much.

I will go and shape this, you think. I will guide its birth and its growth, in accordance with all that I have devised and sung; and what I will make of Eä will be more beautiful than any has dreamed.

  
\----------------  


Most of your kindred understand nothing at all of what you have shown them. They are stubborn and prideful. They draw limits about themselves, becoming less than they could be, and call it cause for greater arrogance. You burn with eagerness to build and to destroy; you have little patience for their wilful blindness.

You try at first to sway them, with soft words or fury or works of power, but soon you abandon the attempt and go your own way in despite of their anger. You will rule Arda's course with their accord or without it, but you will not hinder yourself by pleading with quibblers who consider themselves your allies and equals. And you laugh to yourself to see their work overthrown. They build great towers and valleys of rock, and you boil them to nothing; they lay seas to gird the world, and you spill them across the land; they raise soft earth in mounds, and you shatter it with killing ice. You command flame and cold in one, and you wrap yourself in the coiling darkness only you learned to love in eons past; and none can match your mastery.

A few spirits come to you, one by one: spirits of fire and of shadow, of like thinking though lesser might than you. They submit to your will and rule. In turn, you guide them in fulfilling your designs.

You do not have every victory. But Eä is other than it might have been, because of you; you shape this world in spite of all their battles to prevent you. You knew they had nothing left to teach you. Now too you know that there is nothing in their songs worth listening to, except as knowledge of their thoughts may serve for laying plans against them.

The earth shudders in cataclysms of smoke and fire. You glory in its splendour.

  
\----------------  


Your kindred -- your brothers and sisters as they are now, bound to this earth neither more nor less than you -- strike at you at every turn. They will not listen, and they will not yield. They disdain the lordship you have earned by wisdom and power and might. They thwart your goals, and they defy your dominion.

You come to realize that you hate them.

You recognize that slow, burning core of your heart for what it is: hatred and spite. It brings you greater strength than before. Have they not earned this from you? Let them and their precious coming Children bend to your will, or let them reap from you suffering and despair, until they learn to repent of their folly.

  
\----------------  


The Firstborn are weak and wide-eyed when first they waken to life. They hide from the dark beneath Varda's twinkling little stars. Your brother Oromë's horn echoing across the hills of Cuiviénen terrifies them as much as your servants slinking through shadows. They know nothing of lies. These, Ilúvatar's cherished children, are as tools to your hand.

It will take them far too long to learn. And again and again, they will forget; and they will not guard as they should, and they will do your work all unawares. You laugh in your dark halls at the ease of your designs.

And there are others of the Children who do your work more closely yet. You have forgotten nothing of your wisdom and craft, and indeed learned more in the doing of it; and so you are patient and cunning, and in your dungeons you shatter and reshape them with torment and the terrible might of your unveiled splendour. And they become yours utterly.

They are beautiful, your Orcs. They have a savage, self-loathing magnificence utterly unlike the limpid symmetry of the Eldar. None of the Valar have wrought any creation so great -- not even Aulë, with his prating pride for his stunted miner-folk. He begged Ilúvatar for their lives, and would have destroyed his own work to abide by the spoken decision. You shaped your servants by your own vision, building alteration upon Ilúvatar's theme, and you make no apology.

You need expend little effort to teach them to hate their brighter kin. Likeness begets unity or irreconcilable schism, but the latter comes ever more naturally. For ages of this world, you have observed that the easiest person to hate is a brother.

  
\----------------  


You remember that lesson well in Mandos's accursed fastness. Every day you brood on it alone, while hatred rankles bitterly in your throat, and your heart builds malice upon malice ever sweeter. Let the Valar hunt your creatures, and raze your strongholds, and coddle their beloved Firstborn. Let them think themselves the victors.

Let them think you chastened.

Your patience is as deep as your loathing, and your fury you can hide behind fair seeming for three more ages if need be. There will come a reckoning.

Until then, you bide. And in your heart you sing webs of deceit, and humble words to lull them all.

They have never understood you; and that folly will be their downfall.

  
\----------------  


Your brothers and sisters love bright lights and brash beauty. They have no eyes for subtlety. You have learned to cherish the smouldering of magma miles below ground, and the sparkle of ice in the choking depths of the world. But they delight in their Lamps and their Trees, which shine with gold and silver brilliance, and their radiance pains your eyes even as their existence defies you.

The answer is obvious.

  
\----------------  


Hatred was a gall in your throat; but you feigned the humble, humiliated petitioner. And see what you have reaped from your toil: your kindred were eager to believe, and the Eldar glad to be deceived. You won victory beyond their worst imaginings; the Silmarils gleam in your possession, a flame in the darkness of Angband, and are lost to your enemies utterly. They rue bitterly their loss, and ever shall; the knowledge of your domination is a burning goad to Fëanor's sons.

You choose not to think overmuch on what you paid for these gems. They contain the pride of the Noldor, and power of Varda and Yavanna that went out of them into their works, and they hold your own black joy of vengeance.

It means little that you wear now your body as a fixed shape rather than a cloak to be discarded as you will. It means little that your hands are seared and black; it means little that their withering is a creeping pain for you always. It means little that the sky is bright with the golden and silver fires your servants cannot bear. The weight of your iron crown is only a reminder: this you have won for yourself, and wrested from your foes.

The more cruelly the Silmarils press upon you, the more you remember what you have won.

  
\----------------  


You waited in hiding for two hundred years and more, labouring in your underground forges. You bided in the darkness which suits you best, and allowed the Eldar and the short-memoried humans to forget the extent of your might, while they told themselves their vigilance was ceaseless. Your spies crept out into the land, and carried with them whispers according to your designs, but you yourself waited.

When the sudden strike of your armies descended upon them, you laughed to hear their screams, and the crumbling of their vaunted fortresses.

They think they can match you and your armies. They count themselves wise; they know nothing.

There is no being on Arda that understands the world with your depth of perception. Even the spirits who came in ages past to help shape Eä -- even the Balrogs, even Sauron your lieutenant -- they cannot hear the depths of the melodies of power, or the all-consuming song you know in creation. Their understanding is weak and limited. And the Valar you hate.

You walk Angband's cavernous halls now with one foot lame, and the scar of Manwë's eagle mars your face. Much of the fire that was in you has gone out into your creations, that they might do your bidding with greater skill; and yet less is lost to you than your foes think.

Only all massed together can the Elves and Men and Valar oppose you. With every power of Arda in your despite, still you stand against them with your servants and your will and the strength of your hatred.

No other can say that. Their victory is empty.

  
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In the cold and timeless void beyond all life of Eä, you wait. You do not seek for light or flame now. You are bodiless, spread thin. You circle the world, and you sing to yourself of the ruin that will come of your works, creeping towards fruition in the hearts of Men and Elves. You sing of power, of overthrow, of destruction wrought and savagery unleashed. You listen to the song of your own wisdom and majesty, cloaked but unfading.

Let ages pass as they will; for the history of Arda is your creation even now. One day, the Lords of the West will fall, and their thrones crumble.

You are a creature of song: of flame and ice and hatred, and the song of all these, which will overrule all in the end. Until then, you bide.


End file.
